Mahjong in Saki

May 20, 2009

One of the things that strikes me about Saki is how unimportant the
actual mahjong games are. While it matters who wins (and sometimes
how powerful their win was), the show pays almost no attention to the
actual process of playing and winning. This is especially striking in
the past two episodes (6 and 7), where the show has been focusing on a
tournament.

(Sometimes we get a little bit of dialog about strategy issues.)

This is rather unusual for a nominal sports anime, but does mean that
you can follow pretty much all of Saki without knowing more than a
tiny bit about mahjong. You won't miss much in being unable to follow
the games, because there's usually nothing there to follow in the first
place.

(While episode 7 does show some gameplay, my impression is that it
is just illustrative; it's there to show Nodoka's dominance, not for
anything important about the play itself.)